A Buoyant Karzai Is Sworn In as Afghanistan's Leader

By CARLOTTA GALL and JAMES DAO

Published: June 20, 2002

KABUL, Afghanistan, June 19—
Afghanistan's new president, Hamid Karzai, was in an ebullient mood this evening after being sworn in as president for the next two years. Just minutes before, the grand council had approved his new cabinet and the appointment of several vice presidents.

Mr. Karzai had tried to appoint a balanced cabinet to ease ethnic divisions in the country and to weaken the power of the warlords by drawing them away from their power bases to the capital, but his first steps appeared tentative.

The day had been exhausting and difficult, he said in an interview afterward in the gardens of Kabul's old royal palace, adding, ''I never want to have to pick a cabinet again.''

But Mr. Karzai said he hoped his new legitimacy would strengthen his hand in securing peace for Afghanistan and winning the country much-needed international aid.

Mr. Karzai's main difficulty was finding a balance in the cabinet that would satisfy the country's powerful factions and ethnic groups and ease the tensions that have brought them to war in the past. He was under pressure to reduce the power of Tajiks, who dominated the interim cabinet, holding the powerful defense, foreign and interior ministries. Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, in particular have demanded more representation in the government.

Mr. Karzai opted for a halfway step, retaining the defense minister, Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, but appointing a Pashtun, Taj Muhammed Wardak, an elderly former governor, as interior minister. Delegates approved his cabinet, but few saw Mr. Wardak as a serious counterweight for Marshal Fahim.

Dr. Abdullah, another of the influential Tajiks, will remain foreign minister, and Yunus Qanooni, who resigned as interior minister, will be minister of education.

Mr. Karzai said he was looking further than just a balanced distribution of posts. ''We have to have technical people in the interior ministry, to take away the political character of this ministry, and we need a technical and professional minister.''

Of Mr. Wardak, he said: ''He is a man who has experience of provincial matters, who has governed before. Let's give him a chance.''

Mr. Karzai defended keeping Marshal Fahim, saying it would maintain continuity in the campaign against terrorism. ''He's the minister of defense,'' he said. ''He has people that he has, the coalition is working with him and we have an antiterrorism campaign to complete. We cannot just turn things upside down and bring changes overnight.''

Mr. Karzai said a new defense commission would oversee the building of a national army, which Marshal Fahim has not always supported, and he emphasized that the institutions would become more important than individuals.

In a clear attempt to strengthen his central government and to loosen some of the warlords from their power bases, Mr. Karzai appointed three of them vice presidents this week: Marshal Fahim, the Hazara leader, Karim Khalili, and Haji Abdul Qadir, the Pashtun governor of Nangarhar. They would move to Kabul to take on portfolios yet to be announced. The aim, Mr. Karzai said, was to create ''a national effort to bring more security and safety to the Afghan people, and to bring institutions to Afghanistan.''

But in this plan he was also only partly successful. Two of the most powerful regional warlords, the Uzbek general from the north, Abdul Rashid Dostum, and Ismael Khan, from Herat in the west, declined to be take vice presidential posts unless they could maintain their regional interests. He said he would keep talking to them and would continue to offer posts in hopes of bringing them in.

Another warlord, Padsha Khan Zadran, who has openly defied Mr. Karzai and attacked his own town with rockets to try to seize power, was effectively sidelined by the loya jirga, or grand council of 1,600 delegates. ''The loya jirga voted overwhelmingly for me,'' Mr. Karzai said. ''And he was there. And he campaigned.''

Mr. Karzai also removed Mr. Zadran's brother, Amanullah, from the cabinet, complaining that he had attended only two cabinet meetings.

''Stability, security, peace, economic well-being of the Afghan people, reconstruction'' were his aims for the next six months, he said.

Mr. Karzai said he would not hesitate to implore the United Nations to expand the international security force now patrolling Kabul to other cities if violence erupted there. But he said he did not see an immediate need for that, though there have been recent reports of lawlessness and factional fighting among warlords in the Mazar-i-Sharif area.

Mr. Karzai also said that he did not believe that the remnants of Al Qaeda and their Taliban supporters posed a serious threat to his government.

But he insisted that the United States and its coalition partners should maintain their current forces in Afghanistan -- more than 12,000 soldiers -- to finish the hunt for those Al Qaeda fighters, most of whom are thought to be operating along the Pakistan border.

''Let me be very blunt: there is no mercy there,'' he said. ''They are criminals who have killed people. In Afghanistan they have killed people, they have killed people in America. They must be found, they must be taken to court and societies must be free from their menace.''

Asked if he thought that Mullah Muhammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban, was still in Afghanistan, Mr. Karzai said he did, and that Mullah Omar was probably moving from sanctuary to sanctuary in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar.

''He is around,'' Mr. Karzai said. ''Eventually, we'll find him.''

During his speech before the loya jirga and again in the interview, Mr. Karzai called for the immediate release of more than 600 Taliban soldiers being held by commanders in the north. Many of those soldiers are from the south, and Mr. Karzai's call for amnesty is clearly intended to foster regional reconciliation and national unity.

''We must have a distinction between the Taliban and terrorists,'' he said. ''The common talib, he can go home.''

The loya jirga, which has been meeting for nine days, drew to a close today. Still unresolved are the powers and membership of a parliament, but Mr Karzai asked representatives from each electoral zone to remain behind for 20 days to work things out. In the interview, he said he supported the creation of a legislature with the power to enact laws and approve budgets, rather than just the advisory body that some delegates advocated.

''There are lots of things that will come to me and burden me and consume time without a legislative body,'' he said. ''A legislative body will take a lot of my problem away from me.''

Photo: Hamid Karzai handed out medals yesterday after taking the oath as the new Afghan president during the final session of the grand council, which approved his new cabinet and the appointment of several vice presidents. (Pool photo by Takida)